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Leeds Guide: Harry Potter Star Matthew Lewis

“There’s just something about it, whether it’s my group of friends, I don’t really know, but I just don’t really want to move away, and I don’t have a reason to anyway. I just don’t want to. Leeds is where I want to be.”

We are chatting with Matthew Lewis in Leeds bar The Reliance before the release of the final film in the Harry Potter franchise – The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 – which marks a significant moment in the young actor’s career and, frankly, in his life. It’s a real case of man and boy: Lewis was just 12 years old when the first film, The Philosopher’s Stone, hit cinemas, and he has grown with the rest of the cast in the ensuing 10 years. But despite experiencing the likes of London, Los Angeles and New York since finding fame, he retains a deep fondness for his home city.

How much will he miss Harry Potter, or is he very much ready for a new challenge now? “It’s a bit of both,” he admits. “It’s a real ambivalence, because it’s obviously a sad time coming to the end of something that’s so much fun, and all the people, the cast, the crew, just such great fun to be around, but at the same time I was always looking forward to coming back to Leeds, to my friends here, and then the next chapter really. And that’s the exciting thing. Everyone sort of said ‘are you sad it’s finished, you don’t have Harry Potter there any more’, and yeah obviously it’s nice to know you’ve got a job coming up, but at the same time it’s exciting now. I’m ready for that next step. You look at it like an autobiography, and this is the next page and it’s not been written and it’s exciting. For the first time in 10 years I don’t know what I’m doing next, and that’s pretty cool.”

GROWING UP IN LEEDS

Lewis grew up in Horsforth and, apart from a year living in Headingley with his student friends, he has lived there ever since. Is it difficult for an actor to live in the north of England and, specifically, away from London? “I don’t mind London, my brother lives there and I’ll go and stay with him sometimes, and it’s fun, but I couldn’t live there,” Lewis is adamant. “And the understanding I’ve got with my agent is that as long as I’m prepared at the drop of a hat when she calls me in the morning to jump on a train – it’s two hours or whatever – as long as I’m prepared to do that then that’s fine, and she’s happy with that, and that’s what I do.”

The approach Lewis shows is a refreshing one, with both a well-grounded outlook and at the same time a real ambition to hone his craft and develop his career. As we speak he has just finished touring as part of an Agatha Christie play, which he concedes was a big challenge for him. “That for me was a real learning curve. I didn’t know if I could do stage, and quite frankly I couldn’t” – he laughs – “and the cast on that worked really hard with me and helped out a lot, and by the end of the tour I feel like I’ve learnt so much and I’ve filled that hole in my repertoire really, so I was really proud.”

STARS

Although Lewis has been acting since the age of five, he admits he was “terrified” the first day he walked on to the Harry Potter set, although the director Chris Columbus and other members of the cast soon put him at ease. So of all the household names he’s worked with, who stands out as extra special? “In my first film, the most impressive for me was Rik Mayall, unbelievably. Having older brothers I was into all the Blackadder and Bottom, Drop Dead Fred and that kind of stuff, and I absolutely just loved Rik Mayall, I thought he was hilarious. And then to get to the read-through and Rik Mayall was there, I just sort of froze and he actually ended up sitting next to me, and it was so bizarre, and he was hilarious. But obviously in later years, the Alan Rickmans, the Gary Oldmans, Ray Fiennes, just to watch them work is spectacular.” What is it that makes them so special, is it a kind of x-factor? “It is, that’s exactly what it is. It’s some kind of aura that they’ve got. I mean the fact that they’re just bloody good at acting anyway, but their presence on a set is just… it’s not something you can ignore. And their talent just demands respect on its own because they’re just so good.”

There’s a tale about an on-set incident in which Helena Bonham Carter perforated Lewis’s eardrum – is there any truth in the rumour? “That is a true story!” he laughs. “That was in The Order of the Phoenix, number five, and it was the first time I’d met Helena, and we were doing the scene in the Ministry of Magic where she’s got Neville hostage. And she said, ‘David, I really want to torture this kid and I want to put a wand in his ear’, and it was so sadistic and menacing. I mean, David Yates loved it and I thought it looked great. And so she was doing it and it was really cool, but there was a lot going on that day, explosions and stuff, and I think an explosion went off, I went one way and she went the other and I literally couldn’t hear a thing, you know where it pops? And I just went ‘aagh’. I just carried on going – I guess it looked great on camera because I was in pain – and then afterwards I said to my mate in stunts ‘I can’t hear anything out of this ear’, so he said ‘ok we’ll get the doctors’. The doctor came down and had a look in the ear and said I’d ruptured it, he gave me some painkillers. I can hear fine now, and Helena was pretty distraught when she heard. She introduced me to Tim Burton at the premiere, her husband, so I said ‘you know what, I’ll let you off this once’!”

SPORT AND MUSIC

Outside his acting career, two of Lewis’s big passions are sport and music. He used to be in a band called The Transmission and he hints that at some point in the near future he might work with his friend Christopher Stocks, a musician from Leeds “who’s absolutely phenomenal, absolutely superb”. But above all it seems he has a big love of sport, with season tickets at Leeds Rhinos and Leeds United. Which can put him in a tricky position, as both a fan and someone who has worked on various projects with the football and rugby clubs: “It’s tough, particularly when you start to become friends with players and stuff, because obviously as a fan you want to vent your frustration, and you have to be very careful what you say – when you’re mates with Jamie Peacock and he’s about 6 foot 5 you don’t want to say anything too derogatory!”

Having gone from the leafy suburbs of north Leeds to the starry skies of Hollywood, what’s impressive is Lewis’s level-headedness. “I’ve had the same group of friends that I’ve had since before Harry Potter, all the way through school – that is so crucial for me and that’s why I like coming back, that close circle of friends that I’ve got around Leeds. So I think I’ve just been really fortunate with that, very lucky. The pitfalls that you hear about with other people, I just don’t seem to have suffered from. I’ve been very, very fortunate.” Indeed just three days before our meeting, he was embarking on the Otley Run with friends to celebrate his 22nd birthday: “I had a barbecue and a few drinks at mine the night before and sort of topped myself up on the Monday – it was hard work but it was good fun. We didn’t get very far!”

CHARITY

And Lewis has put his fame to good use by getting himself involved with various charities, including Yorkshire Kidney Research and Action for Children. “When you’re in a position that I’m in and you… you know, for example, they asked me to do a doodle and they go and sell it for money. The fact that something like that can make money for a charity, it’s just so good to be able to do that and I love that kind of thing. At the end of the day, they say ‘thanks so much’ but it’s no skin off my nose and I love doing it.”

One final question: we can’t resist asking whether he was a fan of Harry Potter before he starred in the films. Had he actually read any of the books? “Yeah, I was a big fan of the first few books. My mum always tells the story that I said to her, ‘If they make a film, will you take me to go see it?’ and she said, ‘Yes, of course’. Little did we know that, years later…” he tails off. “Very strange. And it was my mum that waited with me for four hours, five hours, at the Queen’s Hotel at the audition.”

Earlier this year Matthew Lewis was named an official Yorkshire Patron by the tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire